


The Lord Tests The Heart

by imogenbynight



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Dean/Cas is also referenced, I guess I have to tag this for, Other, Sam + Cas + Jack are all mentioned, Second Person POV (Chuck), Temporary Character Deaths, This is mostly just a sad fic about Chuck's very weird very pervy obsession with Dean Winchester, Twitter Fic, Yikes, alternate s15 timeline, but the ship is not a focus, but very briefly, one-sided Chuck/Dean, tw for suicidal ideation (brief)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-13
Updated: 2020-11-13
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:01:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27540436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imogenbynight/pseuds/imogenbynight
Summary: The crucible for silver and the furnace for gold, but the Lord tests the heart.- Proverbs 17:3orA second-person POV exploration of Chuck's "very weird, very pervy obsession" with Dean Winchester.
Comments: 23
Kudos: 83





	The Lord Tests The Heart

You build him from nothing, and he fascinates you.

He’s made from flesh and bone, blood and pain—just like all the others—but his soul is as bright and beautiful as sunlit sycamore, and you can’t look away.

He’s beautiful. He _fascinates_ you.

You want to destroy him.

Countless times, since the first breath of life sprung forth from the rupture inside you, you’ve tested your creations. 

You’ve thrown them to the flames. 

Pushed them, just enough that they'd draw themselves into the heat like moths drunk on the promise of flickering light.

But this one...

You burn his world, and it _galvanizes_ him. 

He pushes up through charred earth like new growth after a forest fire; stretching long limbs to the sky until he becomes a forest himself, sheltering others from the storms you send to weaken him.

You move the Earth around him. 

Force him to take root in a faultline. Wait for him to topple, to crash to the ground & crush those he protects.

Still he defies you. Adapts. Transforms. 

No longer a forest, but metamorphic rock that only grows more captivating under pressure.

Again, and again, and again, you try—but in time, even his fractures turn to veins of gold, and you don't know why.

You don't like not knowing. 

You _are_ knowing. You are the source of all knowledge. You are everything, and he is yours, and you should know. 

You should know.

But he escapes you. Occupies your every thought, this hero you’ve created. 

Becomes the focus you can’t shake, despite the endless hum of existence that expands outward from your fingertips.

Around him, the universe hurtles into entropy, but still all you see is him.

His flaws and his perfection. His bravery. His fear. His rage. His rage.

_**His rage.** _

You zero in on it.

But you don’t pay enough attention to the place it grows from. 

Don’t realize that it’s an echo of the hole in your own being, torn wide by the absence of your other half, your sister, your self.

Don’t realize that it’s born of something else. Something greater.

It's a mistake, that oversight. But you don't realize it yet. 

You're too intent on this new knowledge that you think you have. Too busy pulling at the threads of his life that finally seem to make him unravel.

You see him suffer, and you smile.

From a distance, you shift your unseen hand and watch fury rip through him as he struggles against it.

You watch the inferno of his rage consume him. 

You watch as he turns desperate and fearful to his family for help, and sets them alight in the process.

It's now, when he's at his worst, that you plant a seed. An idea. A lie. A way to get out from under your own watchful eye.

A trap fit for a God.

He's at the end of his tether, and he falls for it. He falls for it.

Years ago, you wrote yourself into his story.

At first, it was just a way to try to understand what kept going wrong. To see him up close. 

To look him in the eye and know him as more than just a collection of blood vessels and synapses and metaphysical vapor.

Now though... Now, you've made yourself the center of his focus. His thoughts are as trained on you as yours are on him.

You orbit one another like binary stars. 

For the first time, you feel _alive_. Exhilarated. Certain that you've finally figured him out.

In the face of your power, his anger is ineffectual, but his contempt, his terror at realizing that he’s not strong enough--it’s better than anything you could have written.

You’re transfixed.

But here’s the trouble:

Your focus is so set on _him_ that you fail to see the others. 

His friends. His brother. His son. The angel you’ve been underestimating for millennia.

They all slip under the radar.

You’re so focused on _him_ that you don’t realize their part in all of this. That they’re sustaining him. Making him who he is.

Their existence. Their love. His love for them.

Having them in his life is what makes him your most gripping creation, but you don’t see it.

You’re so focused on _him_ that you start taking them away, one by one, just to see if this is the key to making him crack open.

Just to see if this will destroy him in that breathless, exquisite way that you've longed for.

Just to see if this will finally, finally allow you to peer inside his splintered chest and learn the secret reason why his soul is so radiant.

Just to see. You start with his friends.

His soul gets brighter.

You tell yourself that it’s just the first flash of a dying star on it’s way to going supernova. A necessary final burst of energy before the inevitable end.

But he sustains it, somehow. As though he's carrying them with him; within him.

Fueling himself with memories.

You take it as a challenge. Taunt him with a string of almosts. 

You give him battles to fight and people to save and set it up to be just punishing enough that he's a moment too late every time, and then, when that proves inefficacious--

You take the nephilim.

You make it hurt.

Make sure that he sees it happen. Make sure that it's pointless, and artless, and utterly avoidable.

He carries the body to the car, and his soul flares again, spreading outward in its agony toward the few people he has left.

But you still don't understand.

When you take the angel, you don't leave a body, and he knows it was you.

You hear him in your head, and you can taste his rage. 

You know its shape, its weight, its toxic bite. It’s a perfect likeness of your own. Made in your image.

You think this might be enough. 

You can see him shimmering at the edges, like he might explode at any moment, and you settle back into yourself to watch from a distance. To wait.

And wait.

And wait.

It’s been days, and he spends every one of them trying to hunt you down.

You spend them plucking people from the Earth and dropping them into the shapeless void between realities, just for something to do. 

Just to pass the time.

After a week, there's nobody else left. 

After a week, it's only him and his brother, criss-crossing the lower forty-eight, searching for a plan as their hope dwindles to nothing.

He’s been behind the wheel for eight straight hours, and his brother is snoring in the passenger seat.

You’re waiting. Impatient. Restless.

You reach through the ether and stir the air behind him, just enough to make a quiet sound, to shift the hairs on the back of his neck.

It brings you a twisted sense of joy to do it.

To force a surge of reckless hope in him; to trick him into seeking something he can no longer have.

He swerves off the road, and his brother wakes with the sudden motion. Slams a hand against the door in panic.

Dust billows like smoke against the windshield.

Twisting, he scans the back seat. When he finds it empty, he presses his eyes closed.

His throat bobs as he swallows.

It's still not enough. 

You follow them to an overgrown roadside in South Dakota where they've pulled over to stretch their legs, and you take his brother. 

You do it with your hands; sinking a knife into his throat before he even knows you're there.

After, you wait just long enough for him to see you smile before you leave between one blink and the next.

The sound of his shout follows you.

You think this will be it. You'll finally see. You'll finally know.

You’re wrong. 

He’s standing in the dark, back turned to the tree line with dirt on his hands and a shovel at his feet. 

Smoke billows thick from the hole in the ground. A breeze shifts a branch in the woods, and on instinct, he turns to his side to ask, "Did you hear that?"

There's no-one left to answer, but the light in him is still there. Still burning. 

Burnished gold and verdant jade and blinding, glittering warmth. Bigger than ever.

It flares again. Every pound of his heart sends it wider. Brighter. More beautiful.

He’s beautiful. He fascinates you, still. 

That's why it comes as such a shock when he tries to destroy himself.

When the fire has died, he stands over the grave and takes a deep breath, and with a pearl-gripped revolver in hand he tries to make it his last.

You don't let him.

With a thought, you pull the gun from existence, and empty-handed, he screams.

He falls to his knees and keeps screaming, sobbing with great, wrenching breaths.

You can no longer see a line between his rage and his fear and his pain, because they're the same.

They're the same.

It's a single piece of the infinite puzzle revealed.

You take this knowledge, and you hold it carefully in your hands. Examine it from every angle.

They're the same, but you still don't know why. Still don't know how something like _this_ can come from something like _him_.

It doesn't take long after that for him to realize that you won't allow him to check out.

If anything, you're more focused than ever, and he's alone. Completely. The sole survivor for a hundred and ninety-six million square miles.

He goes through the motions. You keep watching.

Slowly, he drives back to Kansas.

_Leave me alone_ , his eyes seem to say. _Let me die in peace._

But he doesn’t speak aloud. Hasn’t made a sound since he left South Dakota. Hasn't spoken in days.

At the bunker, you watch him as he picks his way through the dark halls and touches every surface.

He spends entire days doing absolutely nothing. Spends others cleaning with an intensity that makes no sense to you at all.

And within him, the light grows and grows and grows.

His brother is in the ground. The son he claimed has been scattered to the wind. The angel, the one he’d have chosen with just a little more time, lost to the endless dark that still screams its impotent rage at being awake.

The world is empty. He has nothing.

He’s wasting away in front of you, a brittle shell, too damaged to hold the spirit within, but somehow it’s _still there_. Still holding on. Still blinding and brilliant. 

Stretching out far beyond the limits of his body.

It's been almost a month when it happens. 

You're still watching, waiting for the truth of him to present itself, for his soul to crack open and make itself plain for you to see, and he's on the floor, cleaning under a shelf in the library, and he laughs.

He _laughs_.

Falling back to sit, he lifts a square of yellow paper from the ground and stares at it and laughs. It's nothing. You look at it, and try to understand the joke, and it's nothing.

A tiny yellow square, with the words I AM TALL scrawled across it in black marker.

But he laughs. He keeps laughing, and you--

You feel something.

In that space, the rupture, the wound where you tore yourself asunder--you feel something.

It takes far too long for you to realize that it's envy. Longer still for you to realize that it's more than that. 

It's loneliness, and longing, and regret, and shame, and worst of all, it's utter foolish love.

Because you want that laugh, you realize. You want that light.

You want to inspire it. Want it inspired in yourself.

But it's been so long since you felt anything other than righteous entitlement that you'd forgotten what it was to truly earn something. To deserve it.

And you know you don't deserve it. Not from this man.

So you blamed him for the beauty you saw, for his flaws and his perfection. His bravery. His fear. The love that drives him.

Blamed him for your own lack of self control, even as you blinded yourself to what you were doing.

You built him from nothing.

You made him from flesh and bone, blood and pain—just like all the others—but his soul was as bright and beautiful as sunlit sycamore, and you've never been able to look away.

He’s beautiful. He _terrifies_ you.

You want to save him.

You start with his family. 

When he sees them, his soul opens like a flower in the sun.

**Author's Note:**

> So I jotted down a couple of lines for this yesterday, then made the rest of it up as I went on Twitter tonight and uh... I honestly don't know what happened here. But I hope you enjoyed it!
> 
> [you can read it on twitter/retweet it [here](https://twitter.com/violetmatter/status/1327033620725342208) if you like]


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